Harry, A History

I am giving up because this book is hard to grind through on AUDIOBOOK. It's basically all about how the author is better than you. There are maybe 10 pages of interesting interviews, but it's mostly a play-by-play about how excited she got this one time. I think she has the ability to be a good journalist in the probing/inquiring sense, but she's too close to this one. Also “I shook like a tuning fork that had been hit overly hard” and “The book wasn't LIKE a brick, it could actually be used as one”. Yeah.

Originally posted on bluchickenninja.com.

Melissa Anelli is regarded as an important person in the Harry Potter fandom. However I was never in the Harry Potter fan community so to me Melissa Anelli is just the owner of a rather popular fansite. And to be honest the only reason I wanted to read this book is because it was about Harry Potter. So when I read a review which said this book is basically Melissa Anelli “scrabbling at her fifteen minutes of fame” I was expecting to not like this book.

While part of this book is Melissa Anelli's autobiography it is also a fascinating account of how Harry Potter was published, the growth of the online fan community, fanfiction, the shipping wars and Harry and the Potters. Basically if you are a huge Harry Potter fan you should read this book. There was also one piece of trivia in this book which I found really interesting: It was an intentional decision by Warner Bros to keep the Harry Potter movies and books as separate as possible which means there has never been a movie edition of a Harry Potter book. I am embarrassed to admit I have been reading Harry Potter for 16 years and never noticed this before now.